Today’s post is by a grad student who expanded her transferable skills through a series of summer jobs.

Name: Sudiksha Joshi

Institution: West Virginia University

Department: Natural Resource Economics

1. What was your side job and how much did you earn?

While pursuing my Master’s Degree I worked in the Library (Cataloguing) and was paid around $8/hr. While pursuing my Ph.D. some Summers, I got to help my Professor out and was paid additional 20 hrs/week which was between $20-$25/hr. One summer I worked on an outside research project in which one of my Faculty members was a consultant and so for that I was paid $12/hr. While these are not the side jobs, during the final two years of my Ph.D. I was not funded by my department. One Semester I taught and was responsible for Introductory Biology Labs ($18-20/hr) and then I was a Graduate Student Assistant  ($18-20/hr) for the McNair Scholars Program which led to the Project Coordinator role after I defended my Dissertation.

2. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

These were done during the summer when I was not taking summer classes.

3. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

Most of them did. I learned something new in every job. Working as a teaching assistant in the biology lab was taxing especially due to the grading that needed to be done (at least 100 papers to be graded every week and 200 if I have them a quiz that week) but I had completed all other requirements for my Ph.D. other than defending my dissertation. Working in McNair even though it was a lot of work became a turning point in life and working with students in such a close setting showed me a better way to prepare students for further studies and life outside. This also provided me the motivation which had dwindled to finally finish my dissertation, defend, and graduate.

4. How did you get started with your job?

It started with reaching out to the University career services or for the most part reaching out to the Faculty members in my department.

5. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?

I have learned a lot of transferrable skills from taking on various responsibilities during my graduate studies and those experiences continue to help me even today. I would highly recommend taking jobs/roles (even volunteer roles) outside or even within the department that have different responsibilities than what you are doing now. A broader perspective on things and new skills are going to allow you to consider alternatives and allow you to explore your own strengths and weaknesses and interests in new ways.  Keep on exploring!

Sudiksha Joshi, Ph.D. is a Learning Advocate who connects the dots between people’s strengths, ideas, and data to enable curious and conscious individuals to personalize their learning and life. Sudiksha currently works as a Data Engineer, is a HuffPost Contributor and writes about her personal journey on WeAreAlwaysLearning.com.

Today’s post is by a grad student who networked her way into her side job – but not networking as you might usually think of it.

Name: Anna Marie Trester

Institution: Georgetown

Department: Linguistics

1. What was your side job?

Linguistics Researcher for the website which accompanied the film: Do You Speak American?

2. How much did you earn?

Was abt. $10/hr (and this was more than 10 years ago)

3. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

Job started during the summer, and then continued part time (about 10 hours/week) once the school year started. This was a significant commitment on top of my fellowship responsibilities, and my advisor told me to give it up (actually, she suggested that I give the opportunity to a classmate who had recently not gotten funding), but I had always wanted to work “in film” and this was the closest I had ever gotten, and hello!?! that’s not actually how hiring works out there in the world, so no – I argued for and fought to keep the job that I had secured for myself! 🙂

4. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

The experience was a turning point for me as an advocate, and it changed the way I approached my studies and how I taught moving forward. Up until that point, although I had been feeling a real calling to “bring linguistics to work” I had absolutely no idea how to do it, nor any sense for how deeply challenging it would be!!!

Some background: this film was produced by Robert MacNeil (of PBS Newshour fame), who is passionate about language, and is an expert journalist, but is not a linguist. One of the first things that slowly started dawning on me is that the linguists who had been interviewed for the film must have been telling them (probably repeatedly) that they needed to hire a linguist because they had constructed a film using a decidedly journalistic frame, such that for every point, they had sought out a counterpoint, so something along the lines of: “while this language expert says that bilingualism is good, this one says it is bad.” For a linguist, language is neither good nor bad. We are scientists, so that means that we study how language changes and how languages influence one another. We describe these processes, we would never evaluate them positively or negatively or prescribe how change or contact should happen. (It would be sort of like asking a physicist to say whether they liked gravity or not, or whether they thought it was a good thing for children to have to experience it).

So, what had resulted in their pursuit of journalistic “neutrality” was a film that actually gave a platform to some rather bizarre folks with some pretty strange ideas about language (and to be frank, some of them quite xenophobic). With the website, they saw an opportunity to remedy some of these problems, so I focused on developing resources for them that would bring forward the incredible social and cultural benefits of bilingualism, immigration, linguistic innovation and change, technology, etc.

5. How did you get started with your job?

It’s a funny story, actually!  And one that I tell in my book Bringing Linguistics to Work* because I think it exemplifies something really important about apparent randomness in networking. I had been applying for months to work on the film project through all of the official channels and by networking like crazy at conferences and every other chance I got to talk with anyone who I knew who had been involved in the film (as a consultant, interviewee, etc). But in the end, I got the gig because of a connection that I made randomly at my Graduate Student Association happy hour. Upon arriving at that event, I sat down with a group just as one man was laughingly telling the group “so today, my boss asked me if could help her find a “SOCIOLINGUIST!?!?”” (with a tone that suggested: can you even imagine!??!!)  So while I got the job through networking, it was not the networking that I had been doing focused on getting me the gig. But of course that previous networking absolutely helped me get the gig, because I showed up at the interview knowing a great deal and all fired up about what I could bring them, since I had already been thinking about it and talking about it for months!  So, yeah, I got started because I network, and I now also approach networking differently.

6. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?

Even though I had worked for several years before graduate school, this professional experience was very different from previous ones because not only were my tasks, duties, and responsibilities not at all clearly defined, I had to be the one to decide what needed to be done, often having argue for and defend these decisions and ideas while simultaneously navigating a complex web of office politics. It was the hardest job that I had had up until that point, but it took everything up a notch for me professionally, and I think this experience was instrumental in setting me on my current entrepreneurial path, so I am tremendously grateful for it!!

Anna Marie Trester is the founder of Career Linguist, a blog and resource center for linguists interested in exploring careers beyond academia. She helps linguists figure out how to bring their unique skills and training to the world of work (beginning with the task of applying for jobs), and the world of work understand why they need linguists!

Today’s post is by a grad student who strategically took on two roles within her university aside from her job as a teaching assistant, which had an unexpected consequence.

Name: Katy Peplin

Institution: University of Michigan

Department: Screen Arts and Cultures

1. What was your side job?

• Program Coordinator, Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) series for the Center of Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) – I basically was a full team member with staff from CRLT, doing everything from making copies all the way up to designing and presenting seminar content. I ran two seminar sessions (2015 and 2016) and one conference (2016) under this title.

• Graduate Teaching Consultant, also with CRLT – I observed graduate student instructors, worked one on one to improve their teaching, and facilitating workshops of my own design to graduate students.

2. How much did you earn?

$20/hr – my hours varied widely, averaging five to ten hours a week, and 30-40 hours a week for the 5 weeks the seminar ran (in May of each year.)

3. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

My advisor was not supportive of my alt-ac career planning, so I did not fully disclose this work to her. Logistically, I worked with my department administrator (who handled our budget) in confidence, and she worked directly with CRLT (which was also a unit within the University) to make sure that I complied with hour restrictions for my funding as it changed from semester to semester. In terms of managing my time, I was also teaching a full load and working on my dissertation, so I scheduled on-campus meetings with CRLT around my teaching schedule, and generally tried to put out whatever fire was burning the brightest at any one moment.

4. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

It was definitely a strategic move to work at CRLT, as I knew early on that I wanted to be prepared for a wide range of post-PhD career moves. I figured that teaching-focused institutions would look kindly on the pedagogy aspects of the work, that non-profits would appreciate the administrative, budget and publicity parts of my portfolio, and that I would have extensive experience to prepare me for a variety of positions in other teaching centers. It did definitely detract from my graduate work, however – compared to some of my other peers, I published less and often missed out on things like scholarly talks because of my schedule.

5. How did you get started with your job?

I completed the Preparing Future Faculty seminar as a participant in 2014, and approached one of the facilitators for an informational interview about her role in the teaching center. When the program coordinator position came up, she emailed me to encourage an application, and to apply for the teaching consulting position the next year.

6. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?

Looking back, I feel I might have focused too narrowly on the field of educational/professional development when pursuing work experiences during the PhD. When I graduated and entered the market, I was over-qualified for post-docs in professional development, but also was passed over for positions in teaching centers that ultimately went to people with post-docs. Because I was geographically tied to one location because of my partner’s career, there were only so many jobs in that field in our city (and even fewer tenure-track or adjuncting opportunities in my research area) and my resume was still decidedly “higher-ed.”

Katy Peplin completed her PhD in Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan in 2016 and is now a graduate student coach, specializing in wellness, mental health, and sustainable work/life balance during graduate school. See more at www.katypeplin.com, where she blogs regularly about all things grad student.

Today’s post is by a PhD who had extensive work experience prior to starting grad school, which she leveraged into several relatively remunerative part-time jobs. She shares honestly about the effect her extra work had on her personally.

Name: Marika Morris

Institution: Carleton University

Department: Canadian Studies Ph.D.

1. What was your side job?

• Research Coordinator, Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW), on a part-time basis
• Research consultant – I produced research on contract for Health Canada which was an overview and analysis of gender-sensitive home and community care research, with policy implications. Part of that contract involved travel to be a keynote speaker at a conference on that issue.

2. How much did you earn?

About CAD $30,000 the first year of my Ph.D., not including academic funding. This was much less than I had earned the previous year full-time in the labor market.

3. How did you balance your job with your graduate work?

Not very well. It was very stressful, because I was also a teaching assistant at the university. I had to start on anti-anxiety medication. I eventually resigned my CRIAW job, and took on further research contracts only after my scholarship funds ran out.

4. Did your job complement your graduate work or advance your career?

Yes. Although my academic research was not on the same topic, the publication for Health Canada has been widely quoted and expanded my professional networks. The CRIAW job provided me with a sense of community which was lacking at the university, and both the Health Canada and CRIAW jobs provided me with a sense of accomplishment and value as a researcher. I had already been working as a researcher for 14 years before starting the Ph.D., but this experience did not seem to count for much with some professors.

5. How did you get started with your job?

I was already Research Coordinator at CRIAW when I reduced my hours to complete a Ph.D.. The Health Canada contract came from previous gender and home care research I had done.

6. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?

Looking back, it’s amazing that I did not have a nervous breakdown. It was a mistake to take a full course load and have three part-time jobs. However, it was very interesting and valuable, and it would have been hard to give up any of those opportunities. It is very important to gain/maintain work experience outside academe.

Marika Morris has worked as a Senior Policy Research Advisor in the Government of Canada, as a Researcher/Legislative Assistant for two Canadian Members of Parliament, was Research Coordinator for the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women and did a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Faculty of Education, Western University. She now runs Marika Morris Consulting, which specializes in research, evaluation and training services. She is also an Adjunct Research Professor at the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.